Category Archives: History

Who did what when where

NSA documents in the ARC: The myth of “unknown” records

Of the 35556 records from the JFK Assassination Record Collection (ARC) which were processed by NARA in 2017, one of the more interesting sets was 244 records from the National Security Agency (NSA). Two of these records had been withheld … Continue reading

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Forthcoming on the JFK Assassination Records Collection

I’m working on a new web page that will serve as an introduction to the JFK Assassination Record Collection (ARC) at the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA). My guess is that I can have it up sometime next week. … Continue reading

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Counting records at Mary Ferrell

[Text revised and postscript added 2018-03-13] I’ve been doing some record counting at the Mary Ferrell website (MF). This is possible through a tool added to MF in 2016, called the JFK Database Explorer. According to the FAQ for the … Continue reading

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Problems and a pause

I am concerned that I have gotten several things wrong in recent posts, so for now I am going to stop posting about the JFKRA releases at NARA. It will probably take a while to figure out what’s what. This … Continue reading

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Tentative numbers for NARA 2018

[See the postscript added on 3/25/2018] I have finished looking at the 3082 records which are listed in NARA 2018, but not in NARA 2017, as discussed by John Greenewald (see earlier post). Unfortunately, I have not been able to … Continue reading

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Indexing at NARA: Putting the pieces together

This is another post on the JFK Records Act Release 6 at NARA. To get up to speed on the subject, I suggest looking at the other posts in this category (JFK ARCA). As I noted at the end of … Continue reading

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A note on NARA 2018

I am still looking at NARA 2018, the new list of JFK records from NARA which The Black Vault website posted January 29. It is interesting and helpful information, but as I said in my last post, I don’t think … Continue reading

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Another list from NARA

Another list from NARA has been posted, this time at The Black Vault. The link can be found here. According to the link, the list is the result of an FOIA case (#NARA-NGC-2018-000072), and the BV was nice enough to … Continue reading

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Review of The Man on Mao’s Right

Portrait of a diplomat Ji, Chaozhu. The man on Mao’s right: from Harvard yard to Tiananmen Square, my life inside China’s Foreign Ministry. New York: Random House, 2008. For those interested in the rise of the Chinese diplomatic establishment, this … Continue reading

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JFKRA Release 6: Different versions

[This article was revised on 1/30/2018 to correct several major points.] As I noted in an earlier post, there are a number of records listed twice in NARA’s spreadsheet of the JFKRA documents which it has posted on line. These … Continue reading

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